According to Inside Higher Education, the university first responded to the alumni complaint by threatening the group with legal action for using the university’s name in its own name, group literature, and activities.

Then, after the alumni group adjusted its name, and in response to questions from IHE, the university responded that academic freedom permits the course to adopt its perspective.

But the university added that the university opposes “the promotion of propositions and values contrary to Catholic teaching,” even when that teaching is contrary to academic and professional standards.

It appears that the university is only as academically free as the Vatican requires it to be.

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10 Comments

Franciscans are usually pretty cool and fairly liberal. I wonder what happened to this bunch. They must have have more than the usual number of self loathing closet cases.

Paul DouglasSeptember 5, 2012 at 1:29 pm -

Depends which Franciscans. I had a friend leave the Third Order (TOR) group about 18 months ago because of homophobia. The group in Minnesota wasn’t bad but when he got to Loretto in Pennsylvania, things started to go south. There are some very Santorum-like, übercatholicks in that part of the world. His fellow monks in training were all young and apparently pretty homophobic, which if you’d seen the same photos of them that I saw, you’d suspect a little reaction-formation going on. Self-loathing, closeted homosexual men in the romanist church…. Quelle surprise!

AlexNDSeptember 5, 2012 at 2:16 pm -

The comment I made about Robert Delahunty applies to these people too. SHEESH. Is this kind of reasoning normal to the right-wing these days?

John PatrickSeptember 5, 2012 at 2:36 pm -

This University was affected by the Charismatic movement in the Sixties. The leadership is very right wing Roman Catholic.

RuthSeptember 5, 2012 at 6:44 pm -

I am proud to be a part of the Franciscan Gay Alumni and Allies. We were shocked by the language being employed by the University which classes homosexuals in the same strain of ‘deviancy’ as rapists and murderers. I am not surprised they are crying ‘freedom of religion’. They also claimed that other, secular, Universities use the same course description. A quick Google of the SKW course description shows that there no other Universities out there who are using the same description.
All we asked was that they amend the course description to reflect APA standards. And for that we were threatened with a law suit.
Shame on them.

MerlynSeptember 6, 2012 at 5:54 am -

You’re right Paul. When I was a Third Order Francsican back in the 70s, they were pretty right wing and homophobic.

Maybe something should be done to see if their distortion and flat out lying about homosexuality as a “deviant behaviour” could affect their being able to be accredited to teach this course since this is against all modern understanding of science when it comes to GLBT orientation. Just a thought.

Franciscan University was a small, nearly bankrupt college in 1974. To save the College, the Board hired Fr Michael Scanlan TOR to be President. Fr Scanlan initiated the influx of Charismatic Protestants and Catholics to save the school. It was re-branded a Charismatic College and was marketed as such by the Admissions Department at the College.

In support of this endeavor Fr Scanlan also enlisted the help of a local Covenant Community. Fr Scanlan happened to be the Head Coordinator of this community, which was actually controlled by an umbrella group of Covenant Communities known after 1980 as The Sword of The Spirit.

The Sword of the Spirit was a non-denominational christian group that used interpretations of scripture not approved by the Catholic Church. Fr Scanlan was the bridge that brought these teachings into the Covenant Community first, then into the University.

Thus we have today in FUS something of a hybrid Catholicism, one that appears to align with the thinking of Rick Santorum, who polls showed most Catholics would not vote for.

My father and I attended a charismatic Catholic church in the early 1980s. They encouraged me to consider FUS, but I could tell that a) they were way too arrogant and uptight for their modest stature, and b) they were located in the middle of nowhere. I mean, really, Steubenville??

So I attended the liberal-Catholic University of Dayton instead.

billydee4September 6, 2012 at 4:29 pm -

Bernard Groeschel recently wrote an article for the National Catholic Register, a conservative Catholic publication, that said that molesting priests were often the victims of wily, manipulative teen-age boys. He is a Franciscan. I know of a group of Franciscans from Wisconsin who ran my parent’s parish in Chicago for years. I have never seen such a nelly group of men in dresses in my life.
I once was watching a show on EWTN, the conservative Catholic TV network, and I saw a seminarian who was actually quite good looking. I started to fantasize about him and then I realize the layers and layers of b******t and internal homophobia I would have to wade through before I could even kiss him, I gave up.

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